After the no. 1 movies, the world tour, the clothing line, and kissing a Jonas brother, what's there for a sweet 16-year-old to do?

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There are giant oatmeal cookies, thick, chewy brownies, and milk chocolate bonbons galore; sugar-sweet cereals, buckets of Twizzlers, hot buttered popcorn, and more; strawberry shortcake with baseball-size berries and homemade whipped cream to explore...Oompa-Loompas and Everlasting Gobstoppers aside, Willy Wonka's chocolate factory has nothing on the Disney Channel's Hannah Montana set, a junk food paradise where children of all ages and crewmembers of all sizes avoid the platters of fresh vegetables and sandwiches like the plague.

At the center of this teen idyll is the most golden of the Golden Ticket holders, Miley Cyrus, otherwise known as Hannah Montana, the secret pop-star alter ego of TV high-schooler Miley Stewart. She's the one over there in the red BeDazzled jacket and pink rhinestone fingerless glove, the one with two multiplatinum albums, a sold-out concert tour, two hit films, a best-selling autobiography, and a new clothing line. Right now she's the one having to literally act her age—16—in a scene where Miley's sorry for complaining about her best friend, Lilly (Emily Osment), and her "squeaky, leaky" pet hamster behind her back. "As miserable as I was," Cyrus is saying, "I was 10 times more miserable when I came back and my best friend was gone." The girls hug, the director cuts, and the caged rodent keeps spinning his wheel. Cyrus flops down on the twin bed, stares at the hamster, and says to no one in particular, "Why does he think that's fun?" She lets out a deep laugh. "That mouse is running crooked like he's drunk!" A set photographer asks the costars to pose together, to which Cyrus, feigning diva, replies, "You'll have to call my agent."

Past the sets of Miley's bedroom; the Stewarts' Malibu kitchen; Rico's Surf Shop on the beach...down one long corridor and then another, is Cyrus' dressing room, where her grandmother Loretta "Mammie" Finley is sitting where she sits every day, in an alcove, armed with a letter opener, surrounded by postal buckets overflowing with fan mail. Still a great beauty, she wears a silvery white bouffant and black rhinestone glasses. "I open it all," Finley says in a soft Southern lilt. She holds up a stamped 8" x 10" envelope self-addressed in curlicue handwriting. "They send one of these, and I send them back an autographed picture." Her slender, manicured hand picks up a letter. "Some of them are sick," she says, her voice sad. "We send those letters to the Make a Wish Foundation. Every week we have a Make a Wish kid who's terminally ill visit the set. Had one today."

Yapping at Finley's heels are Cyrus' pet Yorkies, Rodeo and Sophie, the latter having just had knee-replacement surgery. Suddenly, Cyrus comes running down the hall, ducking behind a side curtain. Tearing back out, she's trailed by a lanky, dark, dreamboat of a guy carrying a guitar. This would be Justin Gaston, boyfriend, aspiring musician and actor, and God-fearing Christian, who has a scripture verse, Psalms 7:8, tattooed down his back: "Judge me, oh Lord, according to my righteousness." He's often referred to as an underwear model, having posed in Hugo Boss, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Diesel skivvies. His girlfriend finds this annoying. "He was younger when he did that. He was 18, 19!" she says. He's 20 now. And according to the publicist giving the tour, he's running away from me.

Gaston is a semipermanent fixture here behind the curtain, which opens to reveal a cozy little loungelike area decorated with couches, flower lamps, and blown-up photographs of the New York City skyline and Marilyn Monroe. He and Miley were introduced by her dad, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, who, before costarring on Hannah Montana as Miley Stewart's father, was best known for his mullet and 1992 monster hit "Achy Breaky Heart." It was during his hosting gig on last year's Nashville Star, the country version of American Idol, that Billy Ray took a shine to Gaston. When the young Tennessean was voted off in tenth place, Billy Ray looked into the camera and declared, "This kid is gonna be a big, big movie star. I'm callin' it right now. Tom Cruise, look out!" (Funnily enough, Cruise was here on the Hannah set yesterday. "His son, Connor, is job-shadowing me," Miley says. "I guess he wants to be an actor. He's really cute!")

Her reaction to Gaston was less enthusiastic. "My dad showed me a picture of him, and I'm like, `He's okay,' " Miley recalls. "He said, `You don't think he's really hot?' And I was like, `He's not really my type. Too pretty.' He was like, `What? You're the only girl that's not freaking out about him right now.'

"[Justin] came to the set with my dad in September because my dad was helping him write some music. My dad said, `Hey, I have a surprise for you.' And I'd been wanting a puppy. And my first words out of my mouth when I met him were, `You're not a puppy.' He thought I was, like, just funny. I literally looked so ugly. I had my hair slicked back, baggy jeans, Nikes, just so bad, and my glasses. He was trying to make conversation with me, like, `Do you wear those glasses for fashion, or do you really need them?' I was like, `I really need them.' And we just started talking. We're together, and then again, we're not. Some people see us more as friends and don't get why we work in a relationship. They're like, It's weird, best friends shouldn't date! But the person that you eventually spend the rest of your life with—I'm not saying it's him—why are you going to wake up with someone every day and not want to hang out with them?"

Here comes her friend now, strolling back down the hall, strumming his guitar, head slightly bowed, a small smile on his face. Most parents would meet this guy and lock their daughters up. They'd keep their wives away from him too.

Gaston braves an introduction. Asked if he's the entertainment around here, he answers, "Wouldn't be me." So, is it true he's set to star in an HBO drama produced by Simon Fuller's company? He cocks a heavy eyebrow, strums a chord, and says, "I don't know." That smile again. A mention of his brief TV appearance as a high school jock on Glee last night turns his expression forlorn: "Man, they cut my one line."

"How's it goin', homies?" Miley Cyrus arrives at her favorite Japanese restaurant and gives her publicist a hug. (She's old enough to drive, but until she turns 18, she can't do anything work- related without an adult chaperone.) Cyrus consumes sushi the way most kids eat fast food: "This is the fifth night in a row for me." Long-limbed and curvaceous, wearing tight, faded jeans and a deep-cut V-neck charcoal tee, she looks both older and younger than her years. Her face is still round with baby fat, and free of teenage acne. She has her grandmother's big blue doll eyes and a rosebud mouth and small white teeth that slightly overlap. "I like these crooked," Cyrus says, touching the front two. "I love my teeth. My dad won't let me fix my teeth or cut my hair. He loves it. He's like, `It's you!'"

At a time when world fortunes are falling, Cyrus is the head of a booming billion-dollar franchise. Disney might argue the semantics, but as her father says, "With or without the wig, the voice is Miley's, the talent is Miley's, the laughter is Miley's. Hannah is undeniably Miley." Which is not to say that Cyrus is simply playing herself. She has the comic timing, rubber-faced reactions, and precision pratfalls of a budding Lucille Ball. There's no shortage of self-deprecating, Lucy-like Miley antics that warrant an "Oh, Rick-eee!" Add to that the voice—the depth and strength reminiscent of Linda Ronstadt or of Rosanne Cash, whose late, great father, Johnny, is Cyrus' favorite singer. She can hold her own on a stage in front of 50,000 screaming tweens with only a guitar, singing by herself, and can bring them to a reverent silence with the opening chords of "The Climb," a song she wrote herself. Last year, she ranked No. 35 on the Forbes Celebrity 100 power list; her annual income was $25 million. Next year her numbers will improve. "Disney works you like crazy once they get a hold of you. Miley's a good example of that," says Osment, whose role as Lilly was the one Cyrus originally auditioned for. "They make sure she's everywhere and promoted very well."

"It's kinda crazy right now, my schedule," Cyrus admits. "I'm a busy body." In short succession, she is starting a new film, The Last Song, written expressly for her by novelist Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, A Walk to Remember); going on tour; and launching her own clothing line with Max Azria for Wal-Mart. "Oh my God, I'm so stoked! It's a lot of peasanty, flowy tops, hippie and loose and sexy, like boho chill mixed with English-rocker-esque—plaids, studs, rips, cool colors. The jeans are my favorite part of the entire line. Because, like, literally, this is going to be good for, like, Middle America, and it will be great for kids that really want to be in fashion but they don't have it available. I'm really into high fashion. The jeans, like, literally, I would pay $500 for the jeans that we make for $20."

Cyrus speaks at auctioneer speed, a Valley Girl by way of Nashville, which is where she was born in 1992. Billy Ray and Tish Finley married a year later, Brady Bunch-ing with her two children, baby Miley, and, eventually, two more, a brother, Braison, and a sister, Noah. Tish, a former ballerina, is a producer on The Last Song, and all five kids are born entertainers. "Our lives have always been in the big tent of the circus," Billy Ray says. "The kids grew up in that tent. Show business has always been the cornerstone of our livelihood. It's what we do."

Paging through the family photos in her autobiography, Miles to Go, you can see especially in Miley the mutual camera love. It's the reason she went in for the supporting role and walked out with the lead. "She always had a calling," her father says. "You couldn't keep her off the stage. If she was at the show, she was on the stage. She grew up around Carl Perkins, Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings.... It rubbed off." One night at an Elvis tribute in Memphis, Billy Ray and such stars as Melissa Etheridge, Dwight Yoakam, and Aaron Neville were singing the "Amazing Grace" finale when two-year-old Miley "crashed onto the stage and started singing," he recalls. "And everyone was passing her around, and at the end, Tony Bennett handed her to me and said, `You got a special little girl here.' Something special happened that night." He'd birthed the entertaining equivalent of The Good Seed.

Billy Ray has taken a media beating over what some see as his daughter's overexposure and the consequent exposure it affords him. But he was a multiplatinum-record-selling star in his own right. And given his daughter's obvious drive to do what she's doing, what better way to keep a parental eye on her? Then there was the brouhaha over last year's Vanity Fair portrait of Miley wrapped in a sheet—it provided about as much coverage as some of the designer gowns she wears at awards shows. "Look, she's growing up, as much as we wish she wouldn't," says Sparks, who has daughters of his own. "I think everybody, when they watch Home Alone, wishes Macaulay Culkin were nine years old, but he's not. People grow up! I think considering the amount of media scrutiny she gets, she's pretty good."

"Teenagers will be teenagers—gotta give them room to go," Billy Ray says. "We talk about a lot of things she's going through. I'm a friend first and foremost, then a daddy, and then a business partner." A matchmaker, too. "I'm not going to talk about that," he says. "It's important to me to keep things between us. Miley's got enough people criticizing her and pointing fingers."

For all its fun, fame, freebies, and fortune, teen stardom can be a tough row to hoe. It's bad enough that the field is littered with the bodies of the formerly famous. Just think of the Heathers and other haters whose joy is to make your rarefied life miserable. "The bullying at school was literally too much to handle," says Demi Lovato, Disney's Sonny With a Chance star. "It was like, Why are people being rude and mad at me right now? I realized something else was behind it—they were jealous. That's why I left. Selena [Gomez] got homeschooled with me to get me out of the depression I was in." She yelps, "Oh, Miley just texted me from YogurTree: `Want anything?' That girl can eat anything and not gain a pound!" It's refreshing when, in speaking with these junior mints, they remind you that they're typical of their age too: "Of course we're into boys!" Lovato says, like duh, at one point. "We're teenage girls!"

And yet, they're not typical. "It's hard for all of us," Miley says. "That's why me and Nick [Jonas, of the Jonas Brothers] are so close, and me and Demi are so close. There are so many people that could be using you. So me and Nick and Demi, we don't need anything from each other. We got our own thing going on. I'm close with Taylor [Swift], too."

Time is the teen idol's greatest antagonist. Do you leave the field of your own accord, or stay to age another day? "I told Miley yesterday, at this stage of the game, whatever she does I just hope that it brings her happiness," Billy Ray says. "It doesn't matter to me if she wants to do another season of Hannah; I'll be there. If she wants to go back to Tennessee and ride horses, I'll do that. The only reason she should do anything is for her happiness. She don't have to put up with this bullshit—the blood-sucking leeches that use you for everything they can use you for, man, and throw you out on the streets. It's the nature of the business. I hate the music business. I love the music." Does he think Hollywood is easier to deal with the country music world? Billy Ray laughs. "They got a lot in common," he says. "It's that same mentality—egos, money. I'm gonna leave you with this: Music, art, love, passion—that's why the Cyruses do what they do. Bottom line."